Senate intel committee still looking into Russian Federation

The U.S. intelligence community consensus is that Russian Federation interfered in the 2016 U.S. election with the intent of helping elect Trump and undermine U.S. faith in its elections. But, he added, "Clearly if any of the social media platforms would like to do that, we're fine with them doing it because we've already got scheduled an open hearing because we believe the American people deserve to hear firsthand".

"I fear if you add up all those things it was a decent rate of return", Warner said.

A spokesman for special counsel Robert Mueller declined comment. Burr said they still don't know who commissioned the dossier or who Steele's sources are.

The senate intelligence leaders revealed that during the course of their investigations, they conducted over 100 interviews, reviewed 100,000 documents and have gone through over 4,000 transcripts.

"The committee continues to look into all evidence to see if there was any hint of collusion", Burr told reporters during a press conference regarding the status of the Russian Federation investigation Wednesday afternoon.

"The issue of collusion is still open", said Burr, standing alongside Warner.

In an earlier post on Monday, Joel Kaplan, Facebook's vice-president of global public policy, said the company was planning to hire more than 1,000 people to help review advertisements globally.

Burr and Warner warned that Russian sources are continuing to try to influence elections, not just in the US but in other countries like France where recent national votes have been held. Facebook turned over the 3,000 involved ads to congressional investigators.

"Among the most pernicious features of Russian interference was the cynical and calculated use of social media to divide Americans and exploit our internal divisions", Schiff said in his statement.

Regarding where the committee's investigation stands, Burr said his team continues to pursue whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russian Federation, adding: "I'm not going to even discuss initial findings because we haven't any".

The same day it gave to the Senate Intelligence Committee more than 3,000 ads that it said likely operated out of Russian Federation and pushed divisive issues during the campaign.

"In many cases, [the Russians] didn't even take advantage of the most technical targeting tools that exist within those social media companies, so I would defer answering your question until we've completed the investigation".

"Russian active measure efforts did not end on Election Day 2016, and were not only geared at the United States of America", Warner said, listing possible interference in France, the Netherlands and Germany.